Vancouver’s Twitter Lesson

Don’t fault us for not getting the torch up in time, Canadians invented insulin not viagra. #van2010 #olympics

Joseph Uranowki’s joke entered the flow of Olympic tweets during the opening ceremonies. Just moments before, live broadcasts showed three legs of the Olympic cauldron rising out of the stadium floor, while a fourth conspicuously failed to appear. Wayne Gretzky stood, awkwardly, waiting.

“Watching that fourth cauldron leg not come up, I was expecting #fail (used on Twitter to flag criticism) to show up next to Vancouver or cauldron” says Rebecca Bollwitt, known in Vancouver as Miss 604, the city’s pre-eminent local blogger. “Luckily that didn’t happen.”

But sarcastic tweets like Uranowki’s quickly gained momentum. Delighted by the combination of humor and critique, four hundred people — including me, a proud Vancouverite! — retweeted the Viagra joke.

And that’s proven to be just one tiny stream in the torrent of smart-ass remarks and bitter criticisms that have deluged social media surrounding Vancouver 2010.

Of course, Vancouver has offered no shortage of opportunities for the mischievous and snide — as well as the thoughtfully critical. We probably should have seen it coming when an exceptionally warm January brought news that snow would have to get trucked up to one of the main Olympic venues. What really cast a pall over the Olympic opening, however, was the tragic death of an Olympic athlete on the luge run, right before the opening ceremonies; broadcasters who replayed the footage were criticized for days. Then there was the proud dad tackled by security trying to hug his medal-winning athlete. The protests. And, of course, the waiting. Transit riders waiting for a bus ride, music fans waiting for a concert, tourists waiting to get into sponsor pavilions. Waiting in line, it turns out, is a great time and place to post to Twitter or Facebook. And what are you going to post about? Usually, the wait.

How bad has it been? The London Guardian has already suggested that Vancouver may go down as the “worst Games ever.” It’s a conclusion that’s easy to draw from comments like Uranowski’s, or from any one of a number of casually frustrated posts

But do these tweets reflect a massive #fail, or some marginal griping? Any company that has had its products or services reviewed on sites like GetSatisfaction, ePinions or TripAdvisor can tell you that the web has become an outlet for people to vent their frustrations, large and small. Because it allows us to publish right in the moment, Twitter accelerates that dynamic, making it all-too-easy to create a permanent record of those moments that we would otherwise forgive and forget. A snarky, disposable thought can become a world-wide pun.

It’s a dynamic that companies need to understand. People will say what they feel about a product or service when they’re worked up about it. It may be that nine days out of ten they love their phone. But they’ll tweet on that tenth day, when it’s not working, and they’re tired, and they had a bad day: My phone stinks. Don’t ever buy one.

That’s why it’s so important to tune into the positive comments rather than obsessing over the negative tweets that can easily take over the time and attention of your social media team. Acknowledging, retweeting and responding to praise can be your best way of managing the (minor or major) negative feedback that inevitably comes your way. The trick is to put your Twitter knocks in perspective, much as Vancouver’s social media mavens are doing.

“Well, it’s Vancouver and we love it.” says Bollwitt. “There are so many people here out and about having a good time. Of course everybody is always going to focus on the negative.”

“The biggest win we have so far is just how revved up people are about the Games,” says Keith Mackenzie, the online editor for local daily 24 hours. “The Guardian and all the other international media are being unfair. It’s been a rocky road for these Games and weather has a lot to do with it. What are we supposed to do, pray to the weather gods?”

“It seems to be more positive and more a celebration of the sport and less negative,” says Alfred Hermida, a professor of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, who cleared out of town the day the Games opened, but stays in touch by following Twitter and watching the occasional newscast. “Maybe things haven’t worked as well as they could have done but we should be celebrating excellence rather than complaining the weather is too warm.”

“There will be problems, and in every games, the host city is criticized,” says Wendy Cohen, a Canadian living in LA, who has followed the Games almost entirely online, through Twitter, YouTube and NBC.com. She sees the backchannel snarkiness as another facet of a distinctively Canadian celebration. “In true Canadian fashion, we were all self-deprecatingly joking about our opening ceremonies,” she observed. “We are not always quiet and friendly.”

Mackenzie of 24 Hours seems to affirm this point when he says that social media and online coverage “seems pretty positive actually. It’s the stodgy, old boys’ print media who are pissing on the Games, just like they do everything else.”

If my fellow Canadians are prepared to shrug off the online complaints about Vancouver’s Games, perhaps they offer a lesson to the marketing executive who lays awake worrying about that tweet saying your product stinks. Backchannel griping may be part of social media culture, but it doesn’t have to overshadow your joys and successes. And if you’ve survived bad press, you can survive a few hours of bad social media.

That’s the thing about Twitter. It’s so immediate that it’s not lasting. By the closing ceremonies, and for years to come, I’ll be celebrating a two week festival that included great competition, the arts and the coming together of a reasonably small community like Vancouver. I won’t even remember the Viagra joke.

Partner Center

The email and password entered aren’t matching to our records. Please try again, or reset your password. If you have a username from our previous site, start by using that. Please See our FAQ for more.

If you are signing in for the first time on the new HBR.org but have an existing account, please enter your existing user name and password to migrate your account.Please see Frequently Asked Questions for more information.